


Mrs. Butcher Beynon's Treasure

by MotherInLore



Category: Under Milk Wood - Fandom
Genre: Complicated Small Town Feelings, Dragons (Sort of), F/M, How do I tag?, Metafiction, Stereotypes, Unofficial Sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:48:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21979093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: Last night, after the Mothers' Union Social Dance, Lily Smalls discovered that Nogood Boyo is no good atthateither.  This morning, she encounters a mogul in Goosegog Lane.
Relationships: Ben Beynon/Bess Beynon, Past Lily Smalls/Nogood Boyo
Kudos: 1





	Mrs. Butcher Beynon's Treasure

Last night, on the evening of the Mothers’ Union Social Dance, Lily Smalls fell out of love and landed with a thump, because it turns out that Nogood Boyo isn’t much good at _that,_ either.

For eight whole months, Nogood’s blue lazy eyes and careless smirk used to drift like leaves through Lily’s daydreams, affixing themselves to sheiks and banditti and cavaliers who all whispered the same truth in her ears: that the world is as wide and free as Llareggub is little and bounded, and that Lily herself is worthy of all the treasures of the earth. Until he joined her in the wash house last night, Lily was able to think that the laughter in Nogood’s eyes was the same as the laughter in hers, that his mind, like hers, swum with visions of the world Llareggub ignored, of redwood trees and camels and troikas and beaches full of sand pink as rose petals and steep mountain paths where round-faced women in bowler hats carried baskets full of silver.

But the Mothers’ Union Social Dance was last night, and Lily, drunk with cider and the smell of flowers, followed Nogood Boyo into the wash house, where they kissed and tussled among the soapflakes and the dripping echoes of the galvanized sinks, and Nogood kissed her under her chin, and she said, “Ooo, do that again,” and he didn’t. Didn’t kiss her neck again, didn’t take his face out of her tits, didn’t brush his broad, rough seaman’s thumb across her freckled eyelids. Offered her a bite of his little apple but didn’t want to put _his_ tongue in the middle of the world for _her,_ oh, no. Lily got herself off with sheer determination and grinding against his knee while he fumbled under her skirts to grab her arse and decided not to bother undoing her drawers.

Now, in the, clanging, windblown morning, while Captain Cat rings the town hall bell and Ocky Milkman’s cartwheels rattle on the cobbles and the water pipes in the Beynon household shriek in agony at Gossamer Beynon’s demands for a healthful cold bath, now Lily squints, hungover, into her tiny looking glass, tries to pin up her flyaway hair, and considers the inadequate love song of Nogood Boyo.

“You come along o’ me,” Nogood Boyo has said. “I won’t make you do none of this scrubbin’ and besoming and makin’ jam scones like that ol’ dragon Mrs. B makes you do, and no fancy roasts to dry out neither. Bugger respectable. We’ll just have a fry-up with some wild onions and whatever I bring up in my nets that day, and you can lie back and pick flowers and live easy as a queen.”

Lily has the same thought, “bugger respectable,” when Gossamer Beynon chooses mauve over purple and thinks about her every vowel in case, someday, some hillclimber comes through Llareggub and maybe mistakes her for a real lady for ten minutes. Lily has thought many times that nothing in Llareggub matters enough to get that upset over. But last night she realized that for Nogood Boyo, nothing _anywhere_ matters, and that was when his plush-mouthed, indolent face slid down off her imaginary cavalier and landed back in the humdrum, everyday part of the world, and Nogood Boyo will never find Lily Smalls alone in the wash house again.

Lily Smalls nurses the beesting throb of her discontent all through tea making and breakfast making and bringing it all upstairs to the Beynons' antlered dining room. If Boyo wants a girl who can lie back and pick flowers and let him do what he pleases, Lily thinks while Gossamer Beynon carefully butters only one delicate bite of her cold toast at a time, if that's what he wants, she thinks to herself, then he can go bestow his smirks on Mae Rose Cottage. Always assuming he finds the gumption to walk all the way up Llareggub Hill to the sweetgrass meadows and the nannygoats and lonely, unkissed Mae. Assuming that isn't too much trouble for him. 

"Oh, d'you hear that, Lily!" Mrs. Beynon shrieks.

"Yes, mum," Lily says patiently, though she did not hear.

Mr. Beynon chortles. "I did tell you, Bess. I told you yesterday; I said, 'today I'm going out after corgis, with my little cleaver,' I said..."

"Ohhh, you heartless puppy killer! Isn't he terrible, Lily?"

"Yes, mum."

And Mr. Beynon preens over his ability to pull his wife's leg after twenty-eight years of marriage, and Mrs. Beynon's heart flutters with love at the knowledge that her husband is as sharp and wicked and dangerous as ever.

At the other end of the table, Gossamer spears a wild strawberry with a silver fork, opening her mouth just enough to admit this tiny sweetness, but not allow entry to her parents' vulgar hullabaloo, the meaty reek of the pigs in the back shed awaiting Butcher Beynon's attentions, the temptations of beer and porridge and Sinbad Sailors that beckon from down Coronation Street.

Lily likes the Beynons, really. They've got imagination, all three of them. All four, really, counting Gossamer's older brother Billy, who built the stone circle above Llareggub Hill when he was younger, and has since magicked himself away, dissolving into a flutter of postcards and battered packages and a stiff photograph on the parlor wall next to the one bookcase that holds books instead of knickknacks.

And then breakfast is over. Gossamer has clicked away to the schoolhouse, and sounds have begun to drift up through the floor of the Beynons' house from the shop:the clanks and thunks and slaps of pigflesh and calves’ corpses being transmogrified into thin, rosy petals of bacon and veal, the insatiable roar of the sausage grinder. There is very little custom in the Butchers’ shop on a Friday, when all good Christians and some of the bad ones take their meat from the sea, not the land. It is day for the work that takes time: for attacking the dead pigs with great knives like Saracens, for kegs of vinegar and casks of salt for sausages and pickled trotters, for the careful packing of the smokehouse and tending the choking greenwood fire beneath it. Harry Prothero frightens little Johnny with the length of tapeworm he has pulled from a cow’s guts. Away at the schoolhouse, Gossamer Beynon tinkles the little glass bell and requires the students to show their hands and prove that they have cleaned their fingernails.

Mrs. Beynon settles into the wide wooden office chair with its creaking leather cushions and scrollwork arms. Before her on the desk is the tin lockbox containing the proceeds from the Mothers’ Union Social Dance. Mrs. Beynon will spend the morning re-counting the worn coins and limp banknotes, comparing them to the number of tick marks on the guest sheet, adding the columns of numbers and deducting the costs of cider and cheese biscuits and bus fare for the Twll Moonlight Band. Mrs. Beynon’s fat black cat winds itself around the chair’s casters, identifying a choice sunbeam for its midmorning nap. 

Lily trades the lace frill atop her frizzing ginger braids for a mobcap and trudges outside to scrub the white petals of the coronation cherry trees off the front stoop before they turn to slime. After that she pads about the front parlor, dusting china figurines and gathering loose cat hairs with a chamois skin.

"Lily?" Mrs. Beynon's summoning voice is foghorn deep compared with her usual tones, like a schoolgirl playing at being headmistress.

Lily picks a mat of black cat fur off the chamois skin and drops it in the tinderbox. "Yes, Mum?"

“The Mothers’ Union Social Dance collected nearly twenty pounds for the charity fund,” Mrs. Beynon announces. She perches gleeful at the desk, overflowing with delight and only Lily there to share it with. The triumph of the successful entertainment blends with the satisfaction of having such a fine desk to sit at, a cool parlor full of exotic knickknacks, of being, simultaneously, Our Bessie from Donkey Down, and Mrs. Butcher Beynon, pillar of the Llareggub Mothers’ Union, wife of the rich and clever Ben Beynon, mother of the promising Billy and the refined and educated Gossamer, employer of the Treasure, Lily. The thrill of prosperity never palls for Mrs. Beynon.

"Yes, Mum," says Lily.

"We ought to have some sort of treat at the next meeting, to celebrate. When you go out today, can you order a walnut cake at Dai Bread's?"

Lily twists her red, carbolic scented hands in her white pinny speckled with cat fur. "Beg pardon, mum, but p'raps it'd better be strawberry tarts instead, or the fairy cakes with pink sugar. It's Mrs. Dai Bread Two does the walnut cakes, mum." And Mrs. Dai Bread One shares her house and her man and her marriage bed with seemingly no trouble at all, but she does not share her place in the Mothers' Union.

"Ohhhh!" Mrs. Beynon throws her hands in the air and shrieks helpless laughter. "Lily! Oh, dear! That was a near thing, that was. Lily, you are a Treasure!."

And _that_ is why Lily Smalls works at the Beynon house, when the Sailors' Arms would pay better wages and Bay View is closer to Lily's mother's house. Where else in Llareggub could Lily be thanked and called a treasure for the work she would be doing anyway? Who else would be glad to be caught in a mistake and shriek with laughter, not anger? Not Nogood Boyo, Lily will till you that much free gratis.

\@/\@/\@/\@/\@/

"I'm Eighty-five years, three months, and two days!" Mary Ann Sailors crows from the window above the pub, into the gray, mist-dampened street. Lily's footsteps on the cobblestones beat hollow in the space behind her ribs, where her heart used to be full of imaginary cavaliers with Nogood Boyo's face, and is now full of nothing but the echoing sense of a world big as the sea outside the little cockleshell of Lllareggub Hill, a world that, somewhere, surely, will fulfill Lily's nameless longings and leave her replete and grateful for life as Mary Ann is. For the ten minutes it takes her to reach the end of Coronation Street, Lily sees nothing but wet gray stone, blowing cherry blossom, and the absence of magic.

She tosses her head righteously, imagining how she will announce the end of Nogood Boyo's long siege on her heart to Phoebe and Sally and Our Fran. Within her, the need to make a tale of it wars with the need to suppress those details that, if they became general knowledge, would mark Lily Smalls as Polly Garter's successor to the position of village roundheels. She practices airy phrases behind closed lips as she turns off Coronation Street and up Goosegog Lane. She gestures dismissively with a greasy packet of soup bones Butcher Beynon gifted her with, that she is taking home to her mother before she does the marketing for the Beynons. She'll show that Nogood Boyo, then. She'll set her cap at PC Reese, see if she doesn't, and win him over too.

There is a Mogul walking along Goosegog Lane. Lily drops her packet of bones in surprise.

He is, in every respect, a proper Mogul like the one's in Mr. Pugh's _Illustrated History of the Subcontinent._ He walks unconcerned down Goosegog Lane in curl-toed shoes that really ought to slide in the mud, in trousers of blinding whiteness and an embroidered frock-coat whose skirts are wider than the skirts of Gossamer Beynon's organza party dress, wearing on his head a bulbous striped turban and a thick black mustache of piratical splendor.

Lily stares. So utterly and blatantly impossible is the Mogul's presence, she does not even feel guilty for doing so. Surely, she thinks, openmouthed, surely if any man a tenth as unprecedented as this one were truly to stray down Goosgog Lane, surely he would head a ragtag parade: a Pied Piper's worth of curious children would dart about him like starlings, calling out. Curtains would tremble in the vibration of his passing, as they guarded the faces of the window-peeping wives. Reverend Jenkins, Mr. Pugh the schoolmaster, and PC Atilla Reese would pace backward before him, fawning welcome like spaniels.

Given all this, Lily thinks, as the curling embroidered slippers make their way down Goosegog Lane, she must suppose that this Mogul appears only to her mind's eye, however vividly the fringe trembles on the ends of his striped turban, no matter how dazzling the glitter of gold chains and ropes of pearls around his neck. Nonetheless, the mogul proceeds unconcerned and stops only two feet from the place where Lily Smalls blocks his way. "Greetings," he says, in a voice both nasal and deep, like a bassoon with a headcold.

She scrambles sideways in an awkward curtsey, reaching for her dropped package as she does so. But Lily is too much at sea to be able to row herself wholly back to the shore of good manners. "Where did you come from?" she blurts.

Sloe-black eyes crinkle and white teeth shine in a face the color of Mrs. Beynon's sandalwood fan, marked, 'with love from the T,' with the rest of the words blurred out by years of sweaty-fingered fidgets on damp Sunday afternoons. The Mogul essays a shallow bow, then waves one negligent, beringed hand toward the top of the town. "I have the honor of staying in the Yellow Suite at the house called Bay View," he purrs like the low notes of the church organ.

Lily shakes her head with such vigor that the elastic band of her mob cap loses its grip on her hair and begins to creep up the back of her skull. "You never did!" she declares with conviction. "Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard don't hold with foreigners. She made that one doctor fellow go stay with Reverend Jenkins when it turned out he was Irish."

The white teeth shine in grey-green Goosegog Lane. "Indeed?" The striped turban bobs as the Mogul tilts his head. "Yet if you were to ask her," he says, "she would confirm that Najmuddin Farishta is indeed letting the Yellow Suite. Her establishment was recommended to me for its cleanliness, and when I told her my faith requires that I bathe twice a day, she was most accommodating."

"She never did," Lily Smalls repeats, hapless and bewildered.

"She remembers doing so," the Mogul Farishta replies.

Lily shifts from foot to muddy foot, trying unsuccessfully to recover her equilibrium. "Well, she says at last, "there you are, then."

"Here am I," the Mogul agrees, making no attempt to continue his journey toward Coronation Street, "among the other immortals of Llareggub."

This, Lily thinks, is irony, of the sort employed by those who are rich enough to take nothing seriously. (And oh, but the impossible Mr. Farishta is rich, glittering with gold thread, with hands smooth as butter.) She herself is not rich enough for irony, but she carries within her a fountaining well of sauce. She tosses her mobcapped head. "Ooo, immortal is it, then?" She snaps, "I daresay. And it's milk and honey flowing in the Dewi, I suppose."

Najmuddin Farishta gestures with a sinuous insouciance that Lily could not hope to copy in a month of Sundays' practice before the little shaving glass. She feels herself beginning to slip toward love again, and yanks herself firmly back.

"Llareggub isn't Pemberly, of course," says the impossible man, "but you don't do so very badly, as these things go."

"Immortal!" Lily scoffs.

"Indeed," he replies with ophidian calm. "Just immortal enough to make things interesting for a prospector like myself."

"But we're ordinary!" Lily protests, smelling the briny reek of the cockle beds, the salt bacon and charcoal fug of the stovepipes, the cloying roil of the muck heaps and gardens.

"Immortally so," the Mogul says. "You have been perfectly ordinary for thirty years and more now."

"That's daft, that is. I'm not even twenty."

The dark eyes flash above the curling mustache. "Tell me, little missie," says the Mogul, and now his voice does not purr, but lowers like a thunderhead, "do you remember, once upon a time, when you lived, not in Llareggub but in Swansea?"

"No," Lily says, troubled. Swansea is the _city,_ it is. Only just fancy, Lily Smalls in Swansea! She's not been past Twyll in her life. But the words echo in her mind. Coronation Street was once Cwmdonkin Drive, wasn't it? But when? How? It never did.

"Our Flo's Dylan, the Mogul advises, "grew up to be a poet. Rather a good one. And he remembered things."

"But..."

"Some of his prose works pay homage to a 'small, decaying watering place,' where the 'natives... possess a salty individuality of their own.' It's not Shakespeare, mind you, but then, I should not be able to come here if it were."

Lily scratches at her turned-up nose and tugs her mobcap back into place. "You're saying all of us here are..."

"Fictional, little missie, as I am myself. Local characters in quite a literal sense. Truth be known, I am not even that. I am, in fact, a mere sterotype who has done rather well for himself."

"Ooo," Lily splutters, indignant and bewildered, "There's mad, there is. You had ought to be rooming with Lord Cut Glass instead of Mrs. Ogmore, you loony. And I'll be on my way with no more of your nonsense, thank _you._ " And she flounces her mud-speckled skirts to hide the fact that she is backing away from him, her cracked leather shoes sliding on damp grass, her little bag of soup bones rattling in her clenched hands.

"Good day to you then," the Mogul responds, sounding amused and not one molecule perturbed, "and all good fortune to you." The white teeth flash again. "And when next we meet, brave girl, perhaps you will be so good as to tell me what year it is?" And Najmuddin Farishta, if that is indeed his name, proceeds down Goosegog Lane toward the sea end of town, leaving Lily Smalls to hurry her bag of soup bones home to her mum.

The man is barmy, Lily reassures herself as she pecks her mother's cheek and embraces the shouting mass of little brothers who have tumbled home from school. Barmy as anything. What year is it, indeed, as if could be any time but _now_ with Lily nineteen years old, and Our Dai just turned eleven, and Reverend Eli Jenkins just turned sixty, and the fishermen grumbling to each other about the war that may be coming, sometime soon but not just yet. How could it be anything other than the year nineteen- the year nineteen... It is Friday, May the twenty-second, one day after the Mothers' Union Social Dance, and the year is... is...

"Are you alright, Our Lil? You've gone a bit quiet," says Lily's mum."

Lily jerks herself upright and swallows a last bite of lavabread too quickly, so that the oats bump against her throat on the way down. "Fine, mum, fine," she gabbles. "I saw Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard's new lodger today. He's a one, isn't he? Ooo, look at the time, then. I'd best be going if I'm to talk to Mrs. Dai One before Polly Garter gets back with the Beynons' washing." And Lily scurries out the door. What year is it? Why can't she think what year it is?

\@/\@/\@/\@/\@/

Lily Smalls possesses a sharp and disciplined brain beneath her mob cap with its fraying lace and her frizzing crown of gingery plaits. She is able to banish the ravings of That Mister Farishta from her consciousness in the space of ten minutes' walk to the sea-end of town, where she sniffs and tosses her head in response to the lazy hand that waves from Nogood Boyo's dinghy, _Zanzibar,_ though it is unlikely that Nogood himself has observed her dismissal since the rest of him is invisible - melted down into the bottom of his gently rocking boat that contains no fish today. She strides, filled with importance, into Dai Bread's bakery, where she orders pink-sugar fairy cakes for the next Mothers' Union meeting, and listens to Our Fran whispering a tale of kissing Harry Prothero in the vestry yesterday afternoon when she was meant to be getting the extra folding chairs for the dance. In exchange, Lily sniffs and says _she_ sees what that Nogood Boyo is about, there's no fooling _her_ , and if he ever darkens the back door of Butcher Beynon's again he'll be sent about his business and no mistake. All of which Our Fran correctly interprets as a complaint that Nogood Boyo is no good at _that,_ either.

Then it's to Mr. Waldo's little cottage next to the undertaker's, and then, when he doesn't answer the door, to the Sailors Arms, and then back to the cottage with Mr. Waldo in tow, because the man may be a sot and a letch and a handless shilly-shallyer, but he does know his herbs, and Gossamer Beynon is due to be indisposed within the week: flopped face-down and whimpering on her narrow bed with its lavender-scented coverlet, her thighs clenched around the lump of her sanitary belt, and Mr. Waldo's teas will help until Gossamer finally gives up on being quite such a lady and says yes to Sinbad Sailors.

It is a complicated negotiation, giving Mr. Waldo enough sauce that he knows Lily Smalls is not afraid of him, without giving him any ideas of a coming-on disposition, while both of them perform the elaborate masque of discretion that the medical nature of the conversation requires. By the time Lily secures a wax-paper packet of chamomile, licorice root, mint, and comfrey, carefully blended to Mr. Waldo's secret specifications, her mind is full and she has forgotten that she cannot remember what year it is. She floats through the purchase of two tubes of condensed milk and a new bar of carbolic soap at Mrs. Organ Morgan's shop without noticing at all, so occupied is she with the warm, bubbling knowledge that in a few days, Gossamer Beynon will be pale and tremble-mouthed at breakfast, and Mrs. Beynon will remember that she used the last of the Soothing Tea, and Lily will say, "never you mind, Mrs. Beynon, I went and saw Mr. Waldo last Friday, and we've plenty." And Ms. Beynon will say, "Oh, Lily, you are a _Treasure._ "

It is not until Lily has come back to the Beynons' and set the potatoes to boil for shepherds pie that she remembers again. The doorbell rings - not the one above the shop door that tinkles above the thump and grind of butchery all day, but the one by the side door that fills all of upstairs with a clangorous rattle. Lily ducks through the kitchen door, swivels past Butcher Beynon and Harry Prothero at the shop counter, ducks through the other door into the dark little hall with the stairs that lead to the flat, and opens the outside door to a brilliantly striped turban, glittering chains, ropes of pearls, and a white smile below a rampant mustache. "Go _away!_ " Lily cries.

The white smile grows whiter. “Ah, Lily Smalls,” says the Mogul, “I should have known you when we met before. I would speak with Mrs. Elizabeth Beynon, if you would be so kind,” and he produces a stiff white card and presses it gently against Lily’s hand where she clutches her pinafore.

Lily straightens herself into frowning propriety. She is Mrs. Beynon’s Treasure, and nothing throws her. “I’ll see if she’s at home to callers, sir,” she says, using her best vowels and making sure not to drop the aitch. She steps back a pace and gestures to the stiff-backed chair where visitors uncertain of their welcome may wait, and then clatters up the stairs to Mrs. Beynon’s parlor. She practices in her mind, exactly how she will twist her head and raise her eyebrows when she says, “Beg pardon, mum, but there’s a Mister Farishta downstairs,” to let Mrs. Beynon know without Lily’s saying so that she is not sure about this man at all, at all.

She doesn’t get the chance, though. She gets as far as, “Beg pardon, mum,” before Mrs. Beynon interrupts her.

“Are you here with the Missionary Society?” Mrs. Beynon asks, deep and ponderous, looking over Lily’s left shoulder, and Lily realizes that, in defiance of all courtesy, Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard’s barmy paying guest has followed her up the stairs and into the room, so soft-footed in his curling slippers that Lily did not notice.

Lily spins on her heel to glare at him, affronted, but the Mogul merely bows over his clasped hands and settles himself in Mr. Beynon’s horsehair-cushioned armchair. “Indeed, Memsahib Beynon,” he says, soft and rough as velvet rubbed the wrong way, “I believe we might begin our conversation with a discussion of the Parable of the Talents.”

“You’ve no right to intervene.” But Mrs. Beynon’s voice trembles a little on the last syllable.

It seems to Lily that Mister Farishta’s mustache curls a little more, though his mouth does not twitch. “Yesterday,” he says, mild but smug, “was the day that cannot be tampered with. But _now_ is another matter entirely. And one might ask whether one can truly best guard one’s Treasure by keeping it buried in a stone cave.” He flicks his beringed fingers at the walls of the front parlor.

Mrs. Beynon quivers in indignation, too outraged even to shriek. Lily suppresses an urge to pat her shoulder. “G’wan, Mrs. Beynon,” she says soothingly, “Mister Farishta’s a bit of a loony, is all. I saw him on Goosegog Lane this morning and he tried to tell me I was a fictional character. Shall I fetch the Mister for you? Or Harry Prothero? Or PC Reese?”

But Mrs. Beynon twitches her shoulder from under Lily’s hand, and Mr. Farishta laughs a long, hissing laugh like a very small steam engine. “Such confidence, Lily Smalls. Do you know what year it is?”

“This does not concern you, Lily,” Mrs. Beynon interrupts. “Go put the kettle on.”

“Sit down, Lily Smalls,” Mister Farishta says before Lily can move. “This very much concerns you. This may, indeed, be the only choice you make in your life.”

Lily neither sits nor goes. “Mum,” she says, uncertain, “please, why don’t you just see him off?”

Mrs. Beynon sounds peculiarly sad and motherly, as if she were speaking to Gossamer, not Lily. “I’m afraid, my dear, that he does have certain rights. This much is true: the story ended last night, and the time after that is… much more vulnerable to – “Mrs. Beynon pauses to sneer aristocratically at the Mogul in Mr. Beynon’s chair – “to _his_ sort.”

Lily sniffs. “What sort is that, then.” She still will not sit down. Not for Mister Farishta’s saying so. And she is on her dignity and will not ask Mrs. B what it means, _the story was over last night._ She’s got a head on her shoulders, does Lily Smalls. She won’t lose it just because her mistress is having a funny turn. Or the world is.

“There are two different ways to answer that,” says Mr. Farishta, while Mrs. Beynon glares resentfully down her nose at him, “From inside the story, and outside. From the outside of the story, I am a stereotype. Nearly every story has a few characters, at least: people with names and histories and complications. But then, around the edges, or sometimes right in the middle if it is a fairy tale, there are the stereotypes: the gossipy wives, the scurvy pirates, the tidy solicitors. We’re jobbers, most of us, migrants. We move about where we’re needed. Not as dignified as being a character, perhaps, but we do get to see a wider world, and a clever stereotype can outlast a dull character.”

Lily Smalls screws up her freckled face in concentration. She is not accustomed to looking at stories from the outside. “Like… like the Dame in a Panto,” she says at last, twisting her hands in her pinafore, “Only, all the time?”

Mrs. Beynon claps her hands girlishly. “Oh, you’ve always been so clever, Lily!”

“What about inside the story, then?” Lily demands. She is used to being a character among characters. A comical one, she ruefully suspects, but not a bad sort, surely, and ill-equipped to be mucking about with the fabric of reality. “If you’re a _sort_ instead of a person, what sort are you?”

“Certainly not _our_ sort,” Mrs. Beynon sniffs, but the mogul’s eyes flash black from under his turban, and his avuncular, lecturing tone subsumes into something else, something that hints of secrets and a delicious kind of menace.

“There is,” Mister Farishta murmurs, “more than one name for the sort I am. What word would you use, Lily Smalls, to describe a being of fire, powerful and wealthy? What word for a being, wise and deadly, who flies on wings of magic or hides in bejeweled grottoes, who makes away with the occasional maiden or other Treasure?”

The Mogul’s face behind its shoeblack mustache is round as a plum, his embroidered robes, beneath his glittering jewelry, soft as cobweb. And yet Lily, for a moment, smells blood and brimstone, and her eyes go to the metal-studded belt at his hip, the long scabbard that juts out beyond Farishta’s bent knees as he sits on Mrs. Beynon’s horsehair couch. Cabochon rubies that no more disguise the menace that scabbard encases than the crocheted coverlet on Mr. Waldo’s bed disguises the squalor beneath it.

“But you’re never a dragon!” Lily protests, without hope. “Dragons don’t look like...” The images of kohl-eyed film stars with Italianate names clog her tongue, together with other things: the names the children of Llareggub shout after the sulk-mouthed proprietors of the traveling fun-fair, or their mothers whisper behind Mrs. Dai Bread Two’s back, and the scent of leather, and the flash of a gold tooth, and the sound of Cherry Owen bawling shanties as he lurches from the Sailors Arms of a night. All these heady and inadmissible things that a dragon is not, and that Mr. Farishta, fortunate stereotype that he claims to be, might be. “Dragons are lizards,” Lily says instead of all the things that dragons are not.

“More often than not, in this part of the world,” Mr. Farishta agrees. “Fortunately, Afrits, in addition to being powerful, wealthy, and fiery, are shapeshifters. It is no great thing, to make oneself scalier or toothier for a time, should the job require it. And the dangerous jobs are always the easiest ones to get, if one is on foreign soil.”

Lily’s fingers cramp and she untwists them carefully from her crumpled pinny. “If you are a dragon in the story and the dragon dies, do you?”

“Mostly,” Mr. Farishta says, grave. “If it is a popular story, you will die over and over again. All the rest of your existence, a long dying. If you die once and then people get bored, it is much simpler to recover from, though not always easy. Nor can one always tell, from the outside, if you are going to be a Dragon, or a Prince transformed into a Beast and then restored.”

That, Lily thinks, is… considerably less like being the Dame in a Panto.

“That does sound risky,” Lily says, still trying for her footing in this topsy-turvy daydream she has found herself in, where she is talking in Mrs. Beynon’s front parlor, and Mrs. Beynon is not. She feels unaccustomedly grave, to be listening to such a mad thing and not answering back.

Mr. Farishta smiles. “I am made as I am made. Many stereotypes are content to be simple, good-hearted peasants, or wine-soaked friars, or cheeky lads. But I am a being of fire, and I am drawn to risk.” The dark eyes sparkle more directly. “And I am drawn to Treasures.”

Lily Smalls is out of her depth, she knows, all at sea, bewildered and bemused and agog. But she knows, bone deep, that one responds to flirtation with a sniff, a toss of the head, a flounce of skirts, and a bit of sauce. She sniffs at Mr. Farishta and tosses her head. “If you’ll excuse me sir, mum, the potatoes ‘ll boil dry at this rate. I’ll leave you to talk in riddles amongst yourselves, _if_ you please.” She turns on her heel with a flounce of skirts and clatters down the dark hall stairs to the kitchen.

The potatoes have not boiled dry; have barely begun to boil at all. For all the sway and roil of ideas in the upstairs parlor, the potatoes are governed by only a single clock, that ticks out its seconds the same length each time, no matter how much happens in them. Still, Lily abides in the Beynons’ sweating kitchen, chopping carrots and parsnips and onions, stirring the browning, gristle-ridden stew meat that Mr. Beynon will not be able to sell to any but the poorest of Llareggub’s customers, and certainly not on a Friday. She labors, resolute, the thick, brown smells and her aching arms as steady and workaday as she could wish, heavy and solid cobblestones. _That_ for Mister Farishta and his fictional characters, Lily Smalls thinks to herself, belaboring the potatoes until they slump, resigned, into a gluey mass that she slops all anyhow atop the casserole full of meat and veg. _That that,_ she thinks, stropping her best chopping cleaver again before she puts it away, for Mrs. B for going along with it all. The end of the story indeed! Lily isn’t about to end _her_ story anytime soon, thank _you._

Lily sulks in the stuffy, onion-scented kitchen until the clock ticks over to half past five. She does not hear Mister Farishta leave, but even the world turning upside-down would not be enough to induce Mrs. Beynon to have an extra to supper without telling Lily about it before half five. And the bell has not rung.

Lily washes the cooking things, stretches her aching back, washes her freckled face and hands and rubs them over with the cold cream she purloined from Gossamer Beynon’s dressing table, removes her mobcap and pins the little lace one over her frizzing ginger braids, removes her pinafore and twitches her black skirts into order. She sets the table, listening with half an ear to Mr. Beynon sluicing the blood and bacon grease off in the echoing bathroom, to the shriek and yowl when Mrs. Beynon trips over her fat black cat. She lights the tiny fires of the chafing dish and trudges down and then up the stairs again with her shepherd’s pie. The world is heavy as cobblestones.

What did they mean, Lily thinks, yesterday was the day that cannot be tampered with. What did they mean? Reality is heavy as cobblestones, but cobblestones in Llareggub are slick with sea mist and smooth with time. Heaviness is no help for keeping your footing.

\@/\@/\@/\@/\@/

Supper is a quieter affair than breakfast. Butcher Beynon is loose-limbed and sated, pummeled and rasped into tenderness by the knobbly comradery and rough jokes of the shop boys, glutted, for now, on the smell of blood and the pearly sheen of raw flesh as the fat pulls away from it, the keen glint of knives and his own pointed teeth. For now, he hunkers, contented, at the head of the table in his shirt sleeves and vest, and consumes shepherds pie and pickles and port, and listens indulgently as his wife and daughter tinkle and chime their way through the days’ events, and Lily Smalls, the Treasure, stands ready by the sideboard with her red chapped hands folded in front of her and a glower on her forehead.

Mrs. Butcher Beynon repeats, again, her exaltation at the success of the Mother’s Union Social Dance and twenty pounds for the Charity Fund. Gossamer frets delicately over poor little Dickie Floyd, who is so sweet-tempered and refined, but rather put-upon by the other children. And Fred and Arthur Spit are nice boys, _such_ nice, helpful boys, but considering their home circumstances she doesn’t care to rely on them too much.

“Ah, the kindness of women!” And Butcher Beynon licks brown gravy off his lips with a red tongue. 

Sullen, Lily drops another scoopful on his plate. Nobody mentions That Mister Farishta, who may or may not have designs of some vague sort on the family Treasure. The wet, clinging, ordinariness of Llareggub settles around them again, and Lily Smalls tries to find it a comfort.

She knows the Beynons, Lily does. Knows she will have just enough time to drop the supper dishes in the scummy gray water of the sink to soak and bolt her own plate of food before Mrs. Beynon’s peremptory bell jangles for tea in the front parlor. Knows the fat black cat will follow Lily down from the parlor to take its evening constitutional and meow to return to the warmth of the kitchen just as Lily is drying the supper dishes on a worn dishtowel. Knows Gossamer will retire to her little white bedroom first, and that Mrs. Beynon will want Lily to draw a bath with all the hot water in the copper, unless Mr. Beynon is in a mood to pull her, giggling and protesting, directly to their enormous, feather-filled bed

And indeed, Lily is just spitting out the last lump of gristle from her shepherds’ pie into the hissing kitchen fire and the kettle is just beginning its heralding shriek when the bell rings.

The gas lamps are lit in the front parlor. Gossamer perches in the scrollwork desk chair now, bending gravely over a little stack of composition books, her fine-nibbed pen filled with ink of an improbable peacock blue. Now and then, swiftlike, it dips among the flyspeck scratchings on the pages to correct an error of grammar or opinion. Gossamer has shut her parents entirely out of her head and lives gently and benevolently among her charges and the Forest of Arden, at least for now.

Mrs. Beynon has taken down from the curio shelf a representation in miniature of the Holy Town of Bethlehem, complete with palm trees and camels, enclosed in a glass sphere big as Mr. Beynon’s two great fists. Now and then she agitates the little city until it is engulfed in a delicate and wholly incongruous blizzard, and watches the gypsum flakes settle in their white and sparkling gaiety upon the birthplace of the Christmas holidays.

As Lily fills sprigged china teacups from the silver pot that shines with all the luster her aching elbows could impart last Wednesday, Mr. Beynon holds forth on the subject of foie gras, on the strength it takes to keep the geese pinned helpless under an arm, on the fortitude in defying the snapping beaks and snaking necks, the brute delicacy required in stroking the corn mash down the long throats and into the stomach rather than a lung, in seeing exactly how much the foundering birds can suffer to digest before the next feeding. “Such a labor it is!” Mr. Beynon declares. “The suckling pigs are enough for me, I’ll tell you.”

Mrs. Beynon’s answering squeal, Lily Smalls thinks, will chase away the shade of That Mister Farishta at last, and everything will be as it should be. But Mrs. Beynon gazes dreamily at the snowbound palm trees and says, “Yes, dear, it’s fullness makes for richness. Just think of our own Llareggub, now. Crammed full of details as an egg is full of meat. All the people accounted for, from Reverend Eli down to Mr. and Mrs. Floyd, all the sounds and smells and resentments and secret love affairs, all the movements and countries and mazes and colors and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and the sea, and from the right time and place you can hear their dreams.”

Lily Smalls carries within herself a fountaining well of sauce, but alas, the Beynons' front parlor, drowsy in the heat of the fire, contains neither valve nor spigot. There is no way in which a simmering girl who Knows Her Place can interrupt Mrs. Beynon's perturbing meditation, can ask if she is speaking from inside or outside the story. All Lily can do from inside the story is rattle the teacups a bit as she pours, say, “Will you be wanting a bath, then, mum?” as she peers over Mrs. Beynon's shoulder at snowbound Bethlehem in its glass bubble.

Mrs. Beynon blinks vague, shortsighted eyes at her and says, “Oooh, I don't think so, Lily. You can get on with the washing-up.”

And Lily can only say, “Yes, mum.”

\@/\@/\@/\@/\@/

Lily gets on with the washing-up with a vigorous determination entirely out of keeping with her typical evening lassitude. Evenings in late spring and early summer, when the sun lingers blue on the sea, are a time for scamping and skiving, for utility to be kept at a minimum and for the hoarding of fresh, scented moments that are no part of a Treasure's duties. Nonetheless, Lily Smalls scours and rubs and polishes, in a vain effort to set her mind in order and return to some equilibrium. That Mister Farishta was a loony, she tells herself firmly. Mrs. B indulged him for a few minutes, for some reason or other that is Not Lily's Place to know. And now everything is back to normal.

The brisk loud ticking of the little alarm clock that sits above the stove seems, to Lily Smalls, unaccountably blurred, as though, being unable to recall what year it is, she is therefore required to live through all of them at once. She rubs herb-scented lanolin into her chapped hands and her rough elbows, indifferent to whether the flesh she is anointing is soothed or peeled away entirely. A booming, salty gust of wind hurtles up from the harbor, throwing a scatter of white petals past the little, steam-fogged kitchen window. In the gray of a rainy spring evening, they look like gypsum flakes. Lily clenches her chapped hands and snaps the dishtowel at the window. Mrs. Beynon's fat black cat meows to be let back in.

Along with the cat and the wind and a few of those stubborn white petals, the half-open kitchen door admits the sounds of a Llareggub evening: the distant boom of the waves and the nearer, wheezing thunder of Organ Morgan's interminable rehearsals, the lowing of Utah Watkins' cattle, the tinkle of bottles from the Sailors Arms and the stumble of Cherry Owen's feet as he makes his way up the cobbles to begin his nightly transformation from fisherman to boozy rascal. There is a thinness, a smoothness, to the moments that make their way up the street to Lily's ears, as if they were borrowed and passed along from hand to hand, worn as the bills in the cashbox at the Mothers' Union Social Dance. What did Mrs. Beynon mean, Lily thinks, when she said “the story ended yesterday?” Troubled, she shuts the door on the rainy twilight and makes her way back up the stairs to collect the tea things.

In the front parlor, she finds all the lamps burning and Gossamer sitting wistful at the window, pen drying suspended in her hand while her yearning gaze goes skimming past the closed curtains opposite where Mrs. Pugh crouches with her spyglass and twanging down the street to the Sailors Arms. 

Out of a sudden desire to have at least one thing happen that has not happened before, Lily Smalls clears her throat. “If you’ll excuse my saying so, Miss, I’d go ahead and 'ave ‘im if I was you.”

Gossamer’s hand twitches, spattering peacock-blue ink across the blotter. “I beg your pardon?” The daughter of Beynon house draws herself upright and turns in the chair, her mind completely in the present moment for the first time in a week. Her speckled hazel eyes shoot freezing beams, as if Lily were a spitball-throwing boy in the schoolroom.

I shall be sacked, Lily thinks, but she plows on. “Everybody knows it, Miss. He thinks you’re an angel, Sinbad does. He’d do just about anything you asked him. You could have a little parlor, like, next door the pub, or in the back room. Serve teas and all. It’d be refined as anything.”

Gossamer looks down at her crisp, striped linen lap. Lily can see the flush creep up the back of Gossamer’s neck.

“They’ll be slower to conscript him, you know,” Lily goes on, “if he’s married by the time that war business gets bad. ‘Specially if there’s a baby or two. And a body could do worse for a mother-in-law than Mary Ann Sailors, even if she don’t hold with Shakespeare. Might be time to stop faffing about.”

Gossamer’s shoulders tremble.

Lily shrugs. “Well, that’s all, really. I know it ain’t none of my concern; I just thought I’d mention. Goodnight, Miss.”

“Goodnight, Lily.”

And Gossamer gathers up her schoolmarm discipline and returns to her copybooks, while Lily collects the sugar-sticky china teacups and the cold silver pot, keys down the gas lamps except for the one above the desk, and leaves. From the back hall, Mrs. Beynon’s voice ululates in a delighted shriek. “Oooh, but you’re wicked, Ben!” And Butcher Beynon answers back, “Takes one to know one, Bess.”

Cheeks burning, Lily flees the amorous miasma that is sending its tendrils throughout the upper floors of the Beynon’s home and returns, panting, to the kitchen. There are times it pleases her to know the Beynons are as prone as any other bodies to bodily demands, to boils and constipation and itches and the stirred-up blood of a rain-scented night, but not when Lily’s own yellow-back-novel daydreams have shed their tinsel and left her with nothing but a lazy, fish-scented clod and itching hempen laundry bags to fill her hunger. In this blue hour, Lily Smalls can think of nothing less appealing than other people’s happy endings.

\@/\@/\@/\@/\@/

The white petals have stopped blowing past the kitchen window. The clouds, spent and chivied by the wind, have lifted to expose a line of rose pink sunset sky beneath their worn gray flannel, like a young housewife’s petticoat. It is not yet nine o’clock. Organ Morgan’s communion with Bach still groans out in ripples from the church.

Lily tears off her pinny and casts it across the little bed in her cubbyhole of a room, wraps her yellow shawl around her shoulders, and sets out, grim and restless, to take one last walk in the new-washed air before she is closed in with her thoughts for the night. She will avoid Donkey Down and the little cow paths that lead into Milk Wood; she has no desire to encounter more successful couples, nor Jack Black the cobbler, cranky old Puritan as he is. She will avoid Coronation Street from the shingle to the Sailors Arms, and whatever point between them Nogood Boyo has managed to drag himself to. Cockle Row is no place to be alone after dark, haunted as it is by rough men, wayward and hazardous paving, smells of sour beer and burning kelp, the ghosts of a thousand ancient promiscuous sea-gods now dwindled to marsh-lights and kelpies. Goosegog Lane, that cradles the mossy-roofed, ivy-choked cottage Lily was born in, would be comforting, familiar even in the dark, were it not for the lingering sandalwood smirk of That Mister Farishta. But Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard shuts her house early against the insidious dark with its creeping smoke and dust. Surely Lily may claim her own accustomed territory without fear of intrusion.

The blue air of late evening, redolent with brine and smoke, runs down-soft fingers though Lily Smalls’ untidy hair as she makes her way uphill, eyes flicking between the deceptive plate-glass shine of the mud puddles and the brightening line of the sunset. The demure pink of the sky has grown fiery, staining the grey flannel clouds with scarlet and purple and rose. A distant cowbell clunks. A few birds whimper sleepily in the hedgerows. Lily rolls her shoulders and walks backward a few steps to ease her aching calves, and talks to herself, in absence of anyone else to talk to. “Ooh there’s a sky. That sunset’s just going on and on, isn’t it?

And, as she has half been expecting, That Mister Farishta’s voice purrs from behind her. “You will find,” he says, “that time grows languorous when the narrator leaves a story to itself. A few vivid things happen over and over. Others, less well-defined, happen in a blur, in the conditional tense. The blur will grow and spread, like a fog on the sea; it will roll in thick as chowder, and when it clears, it will be a spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, and the story will begin again at the beginning.”

Lily Smalls stiffens her back and turns slowly to face the oracular and anachronistic Mogul. He has, she sees, changed his costume for another – no less improbable than the first but perhaps more up-to-date. She has seen men like that, not in Mr. Pugh’s _Illustrated History_ but in the yellowing pages of the newspapers and the moony light of the talkies: foreign men with long chausible-like coats over white pajamas, hats like dishtowels draped across the backs of their necks. “Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard locks her doors at half seven,” she says.

“She does,” Najmudeen Farishta agrees. “But I am a visitor, not a part of this story, and I am not playing a role, confined to the limits of my character. I have been a dragon often enough to remember how to fly out a window when I need to.”

“Why?” Lily begs. “Why come here and upset things if there’s no place for you?”

“Because that is where I can change and grow,” says Farishta, “in the places no one marks what I am or do. My work seldom requires me to be more than one or two things at a time; I am, of course, much more than that, but I cannot change in front of the camera, as it were. And there is a shift, of late, in which of my many fine qualities are required. The menace of dragons and Afrits is less regarded that it once was. But oil-rich, ruthless Arabs, now, with a different kind of nose for treasure and labyrinthine schemes that endanger the hero, there is a need for those. And I am intrigued by whispers of dragons that are wise, or funny, or beleaguered, rather than mindless animals. There are so many possibilities when one can take all the stories into account instead of just one.”

Lily blinks out at the dazzling, overprolonged sunset. “But why _here?”_ she bleats.

Farishta’s white teeth flash in the gloaming. “Why not? Your Mrs. Beynon has chosen to hunker down in her front parlor rather than continue exploring, but she is correct about this: Llareggub is a rich place, thick as damask curtains and solid as gold.” He takes a step nearer and his voice grows deeper and softer. “And, as I said, I am drawn to Treasures. And I am just wicked enough to value a Treasure more when I can steal it away from someone else.”

Lily feels the sea mist blowing against her heated face. “That’s just Mrs. B saying things,” she says. “If you’ve done so very well for yourself you can’t be wanting a maid-of-all-work, inside a story or outside, neither.”

“That,” says Farishta, smug as nonconformist missionary, “is not what you are, only what you do. And the same shift of fashion that has changed what dragons are, has created a need for Arabs, has made you a greater Treasure than even Mrs. Beynon can appreciate, if only you are willing to step outside your own story and try on another. Do you know, Lily Smalls, how many stories there are right now about brave, intelligent, highly competent women with ginger hair? You could, if you wish, be a lady knight in a far-off kingdom, a primordial orphan hunting saber-toothed cats with slung stones, a famed spy and assassin, a brilliant composer and musician on another planet, the Chief Executive of a fabulously profitable international corporation, the prophesied destruction of an ancient and corrupt race of wizards. There is breadth and richness both, Lily Smalls, if you wish to seek it.”

“And if I don’t?” Lily Smalls will have no one tell her what she wants and does not.

“Then you stay here,” Farishta’s white-clad arm waves ghostly in the empurpling light. “You go ‘round in circles with the rest of Llaraggub, and the story repeats itself as it always will, and you will find yourself, once again, up to Nogood Boyo in the wash house.”

The humorous triumph with which he pronounces her doom makes Lily snort and clench her teeth, drawing her yellow shawl tighter around her shoulders. But she does not move away.

Farishta takes another step closer, closes one hand gently on Lily Smalls’ elbow; she feels a warmth like a hot-water-bottle and smells amber and musk. His face, when Lily glares at him, is soft and pleading, his white clothes taking on pastel tints like watercolored flowers.

“Come away with me,” he coaxes, “And you’ll never be stuck behind a broom and scrub brush again. You’ll build empires and change worlds, have your heart broken and mended, learn how to take the gifts your own young body gives you, see cities and jungles and hidden temples. You’ll put respectability on and off like a cloak, and whenever the narrative turns its eyes away from us, I’ll show you the finest places ever told of or imagined.”

Lily shivers in the gathering dark, as the vision fades away from her yearning mind. She tugs again at her shawl and, too, gathers the threads of herself into a bundle, feeling them to know what is there. Deliberately, she tosses her head. “And I daresay I’ll be your Treasure, too, along of however many other wives you’ve got stashed away already.”

Farishta looks nonplussed. “I have never yet kept a wife beyond the duration of one particular story, and do not expect you to take on such a role unless you choose. But you will indeed be my Treasure, and I would see you grow as much as you are able.”

The unending sunset has finally deepened into twilight. Lily chews on her lip and looks at the blank velvet sky, a few diamond chips of stars peeking between the scudding clouds.

“Shall I see you home, Miss Lily Smalls?”

Lily crooks her elbow, puts her other hand on the warm paw that clasps her in the gathering dusk. “Home would do, I s’pose,” she says, “If you haven’t got nowhere better in mind. Or if you have, let’s do that instead.”

The thin dark thickens. The shadows of hedges and houses and drowsing horses fade into invisibility. A dark, rich voice says, “as you will have it,” and the warm hand clamps more firmly on Lily’s elbow. “This way,” he says.

Lily takes a step. It lands on neither mud, nor grass, nor cobblestones. She began at the beginning, in a spring, moonless night in Llareggub. But now she is going on.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes, when one is working on a fast-paced, plotty adventure fic where the main character talks like Beaver Cleaver, one is seized with the need to start something where one can just pull out all the adjectives and make like a second-grader with a can of glitter. And sometimes, when that happens, one finds oneself posting what is apparently the very first Milk Wood fic on AO3.
> 
> That Mister Farishta got his name courtesy of Salman Rushdie. His list of potential roles for competent redheads includes Alanna of Tortal, Ayla of the Clan of the Cave Bear, Natasha Romanoff of Marvel, Menolly of Pern, Pepper Pots, also of Marvel, and Shana the Elvenbane. There are more... and that's not even counting the romance novels.


End file.
